Category: al-anon

I recently rescued a shorkie (Shih Tzu plus Yorkie), who I call Pookie. Well, actually, it’s not been so recent now. We adopted/rescued him on September 29th of last year.

There has never been a more beloved dog. When he feels safe enough to come near, he is showered in hugs and kisses. The only way I can get him to come to me freely, is when I first come in the house from being gone, or when I lure him with a treat. When he finally comes, I tell him (even though all he understands is my reassuring tone), “Pookie, Mamusha (Polish for Mom) would never hurt you. I love you so much.”

I don’t know if you can tell by this picture, but the dog, besides cowering, has one paw lifted. Pookie does the same thing, only when he raises his paw it’s more in a sitting position, and his paw goes forward, sort of covering his mouth and submitting at the same time.

This upsets me so much. I don’t know what to do. If I go to pick him up, he runs behind the chair, and then behind the couch, where he’s virtually unreasonable. I started crying yesterday, telling him I didn’t know what to do, and he jumped up next to me, licking my tears away.

Lately, like when I go to put his leash on, I approach him very slowly, and he stands still instead of running around the room until he’s out of energy. Also recently, I have told him when I’m with him, “You can go anywhere you want. You can go in Pookie’s bed, or Pookie’s chair, or “Pookie’s” couch .” And if he’s cuddling next to me, I always tell him he can leave whenever he wants, or stay just as long as he wants. “You can go whenever you want to. You don’t have to stay. You’re a good boy.”

Me? As for me, I feel like the world’s worst dog owner. Any hints? At this point, I’m starting to believe he would be better off away from me, in another home. Yeah, as hard as it would be, I’ve seriously been contemplating it.

Like this:

Alcoholism is a family disease. It is said that the age the person starts using is the age they generally stop growing emotionally. I had never realized that all the time my sister was sick, I was getting sick right along with her. That’s why I was in those roles, of my own choosing, and why I’m still in them, and in therapy learning how to get out of them. I’ll keep this short and sweet, since we all have many blogs we want to read.

When I first started this blog many years ago, I told myself I would always be honest no matter how much it might hurt. If I can’t be honest in my blog, where the hell else can I be honest, right? Here goes: intellectually I totally get that alcoholism is a disease. But that knowledge hasn’t traveled the few feet or so down to my heart. I still have wondered sometimes, “Why doesn’t she just stop drinking?” I’ve been to thousands of family meetings with my parents and Carol at the 20 or so treatment centers she’s tried. You’d think it would be cemented in my head.

A couple of months ago I went to one of my favorite Al-Anon meetings. It had been a while before I’d attended. I shared this problem I have with the concept of disease. I was crying. Almost right after everyone at the table had shared, this woman practically stood over me and ticked off these things on her fingers: “The DSM recognizes alcoholism as a disease, Blue Cross recognizes it as a disease,” (and one other thing I can’t remember she said–I was a little in shock) “so you have to accept it as a disease.” There you go.

Like this:

My sister’s three children, who are grown adults now — the eldest is forty, and the younger two are in their late thirties — like to blame her for the way their lives are now, drawing on countless stories of a “horrific” childhood raised by a sometimes absent practicing alcoholic. This is always heartbreaking for Carol but she has learned to say “Goodbye, I’m hanging up now,” when it gets redundant and too difficult. I’m sure their childhoods were indeed difficult, but at what point does one say, “What’s happening in my life now is up to me. These are my choices. No one else is responsible and no one can change those choices except me.”

It’s easier to blame, though. It hurts less, and pointing that sharp finger at ourselves takes blind courage. I know, because for years I went to Al-Anon meetings missing the point. I talked about the alcoholics in my life: my dad and my sister, and how they had wronged me; how screwed up my life was now because of them. Sound familiar? 😉 I reasoned that since Carol had started drinking when she was 16 and I was an impressionable three, my childhood was essentially taken away from me. I vacillated between the placater/pleaser and the lost child/adjusterin Claudia Black’s family roles For those of you from alcoholic families, which role(s) did you play?

Naturally, I felt tons of victimization in these roles, and I played it to the hilt. Poor me, poor me, I cried at the meetings, and — I love them so much — no one at those meetings ever once stopped me, trusting the process.

It has taken years, and I mean years, for me to get to the place where I can sit down at an Al-Anon meeting and know I’m going to talk about some facet of my life that I need help with. Because that’s what it’s all about. Al-Anon is for me. AA is for the alcoholic.

Not that I still don’t play the blame game every now and then. Who doesn’t? It’s like something that almost rolls off my tongue and I have to consciously stop myself. Oh wait —noooo, what happened was my own choice! 🙂

Like this:

Acceptance is a difficult concept to deal with, even if we’re not talking about alcoholism. None of us wants to be unacceptable, or excluded from a group, whether we’re small children, adolescents, or older adults. The synonyms for acceptance are many, among them approval and recognition.

I know a young woman who is gay. She has found a woman she loves, is very happy, and engaged to be married. Most people she knows are very happy for her happiness, but not all are as accepting. Some are even judgmental, saying she and her partner would always be welcome in their home, but they would never attend her wedding. This makes no sense to me, and seems more than a little hypocritical. If you accept the fact that someone is gay, you recognize it, you approve of the lifestyle she/he has chosen.

With my sister, it’s different, but somewhat the same. She’s been sober for a while now, and attended several family gatherings as a sober alcoholic. I don’t drink often, mostly at major holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. In fact, my mom laughs at me, because I will see a drink recipe shown on The Chew or something, get all excited about it, buy all the ingredients, bring them home, and then the liquor sits in our cupboards, because I’ve immediately lost interest. :P)

Back to my sister. I never used to drink around her. I thought it was a sign of solidarity if I joined her in not drinking. Recently, I’ve realized it was actually codependency, and I was not allowing her a sense of self-esteem, and achievement all her own. She’s very capable, and strong in her own right. But I’m sure she feels that exclusion, that non-acceptance among non-alcoholics, even though she’s accepted by her recovering alcoholic friends. I still laugh when I remember going with her to an open talk AA meeting at Sacred Heart in downtown Detroit. I was so nervous I wouldn’t even smoke, even though I badly wanted a cigarette. One of her friends finally leaned over to me and said, “So, do you have any vices?”

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 417)

Like this:

April is A-Z Challenge month. I have tried this several times and been successful sometimes, unsuccessful others. This year, my theme will be alcoholism, through the eyes of one who has (a) loved or lived with an alcoholic or (b) is codependent. Sometimes the two are interchangeable, as in my case.

Though I usually like to surprise you, Dear Reader, with the “letter” topics as they come, this year I have decided to give you little previews ahead of time and let you chew on them a bit.

So, the first six topic posts will be:

Acceptance

Blaming

Compulsive Behavior

Disease

Expectations

Functional Alcoholic

There you have it. I hope you’ll join me. Coffee’s brewing. 🙂 Pull up a chair.

Like this:

I lie awake at night, wondering what fresh hell tomorrow will bring me.

“Change is inevitable We can depend on that. By letting go of our efforts to influence the future, we become freer to experience the present, to feel all of our feelings while they are happening, and to more fully enjoy those precious moments of joy.” –Courage to Change, One Day at a Time in Al-Anon

So, you might think, as you read this, that bringing humor to the situation is insanity. But you know me and my sarcastic wit. Would you recognize me any other way? 😉 Besides, the alternative is too stupid to consider, and useless. Plus really, who doesn’t love a little Tina Fey?

But seriously, I have had such a hard time writing this (it’s been on my mind for a while), because I honestly don’t want to come off sounding pitiful, or elicit sorrowful responses, most of all. What has happened to me could happen to anyone–could happen to you. So please–don’t feel sorry for me. I’m here, I’m alive, and that’s a good thing.

It has not been the greatest year so far. Lol. First, I had to go back into a psychiatric partial day treatment program to get my bipolar meds adjusted. But what I learned shortly after I was admitted was that this therapist had noticed my hypomanic episode building since before Christmas. Why she didn’t say something earlier is still a mystery to me, but hey–at least she copped to it when my mom finally told me my agitation and irritability were getting hard to deal with. All of this explains why I had such a hard time decorating for the holidays last year. Seriously, I was like a slug, and even when I’m depressed it’s like my favorite time of year. I barely put up lights on the ceiling and yanked out the tree (with lights already on), no ornaments—voila. There. Be happy. Ha ha.

Psych partial started on January 25th. My psychiatrist there (it’s like you no longer have the shrink you had on the “outside;” this shrink, the one in the hospital, calls the shots) tried several different meds, at different levels, and suddenly—instead of hypomania, I started feeling incredibly depressed. Yeah, I know–I should have my own channel on Youtube, because my life is just that fascinating.

Then, I went home early from the program on February 13th, because my back and left leg were just killing me. All I missed was relaxation therapy, but you’d think it was chemical engineering, for all the tap dancing I had to do to get out of it. So I went home.

That night, I woke up in the wee hours freezing cold with my teeth chattering. Yikes. I can’t remember the last time my teeth chattered. So I got up, took my temp, and it was elevated; something like 101. (I’m not totally sure at this point; my baseline temp is 97. I just know I had a fever) I also noticed like a big cyst or something high up on my inner left thigh. I wasn’t too worried at this point. I took a couple aspirin, ran some hot water on a washcloth to lay on the cyst and went back to sleep under like 5 blankets.

The next I knew it was morning and I was in a sweat. Good. So my temp was down and the cyst had also diminished. But then, my fever spiked back up again at around eight. I told my mom I thought I needed to go to the ER, and she agreed.

Long story short, what started out as a simple cyst turned out to be necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating bacteria. Yep. My WBC, which is supposed to be 10 or under, was 21, so I was admitted—instead of let go from the ER—on Valentine’s Day. I had three surgeries in four days in that most private of areas–whether you are a woman or a man–and spent eight days inpatient. Granted, I was on morphine, and much of the pain is now a blur, but still. My fever was up and down, up and down. They had me on I.V. antibiotics, three at a time (once I read a label, and it said 2,000 units!!)–like throwing paint on the wall–trying to see what would work. Finally the WBC came down enough that they could let me go with Amoxicillin for one week.

I had to have the surgical sites packed (with gauze) by home care nurses for at least two months, my surgeon said. So yes, I’m positive 2,000 people have seen my va-jay-jay at this point. I kept forgetting to charge an admission fee. I always meant to, though. At least I still had some self-respect. Just kidding. The nurses were so kind and gentle with my body and my heart. I couldn’t have asked for nicer people to care for me.

Now here’s the best part. I saw my surgeon yesterday for our weekly checkup of the surgical wound sites, right? She was SO pleased with how well everything is healing. Everything has closed (from the inside out, to prevent future infection) at least halfway, in some cases more. In fact, I’m doing so well that she said I can say goodbye to the daily nurse care and she doesn’t want to see me again for a month. After that, who knows? That’s exactly five weeks from the day I was admitted, right?

What an incredible journey!! I wonder what the rest of the year has in store? Bring it on.